The Most Good You Can Do How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (Peter Singer)

The Most Good You Can Do

The Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College. Copyright © 2015 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Gotham and Adobe Garamond types by IDS Infotech Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singer, Peter, 1946– The most good you can do: how effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically / Peter Singer. pages cm. — (Castle lectures in ethics, politics, and economics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-18027-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Altruism. 2. Ethics. I. Title. BJ1474.S56 2015 171’.8—dc23 2014035965 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface Acknowledgments ONE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM 1 What Is Effective Altruism? 2 A Movement Emerges TWO HOW TO DO THE MOST GOOD 3 Living Modestly to Give More 4 Earning to Give 5 Other Ethical Careers 6 Giving a Part of Yourself THREE MOTIVATION AND JUSTIFICATION 7 Is Love All We Need? 8 One Among Many 9 Altruism and Happiness FOUR CHOOSING CAUSES AND ORGANIZATIONS 10 Domestic or Global?

11 Are Some Causes Objectively Better than Others? 12 Difficult Comparisons 13 Reducing Animal Suffering and Protecting Nature 14 Choosing the Best Organization 15 Preventing Human Extinction Afterword Notes Index

Preface An exciting new movement is emerging: effective altruism. Student organizations are forming around it, and there are lively discussions on social media pages and websites as well as in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Effective altruism is based on a very simple idea: we should do the most good we can. Obeying the usual rules about not stealing, cheating, hurting, and killing is not enough, or at least not enough for those of us who have the great good fortune to live in material comfort, who can feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families and still have money or time to spare. Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can. Although the people most active in the effective altruism movement tend to be millennials—that is, the first generation to have come of age in the new millennium—older philosophers, of whom I am one, have been discussing effective altruism from before it had a name or was a movement. The branch of philosophy known as practical ethics has played an important role in effective altruism’s development, and effective altruism in turn vindicates the importance of philosophy, showing that it changes, sometimes quite dramatically, the lives of those who take courses in it. Most effective altruists are not saints but ordinary people like you and me, so very few effective altruists claim to live a fully ethical life. Most of them are somewhere on the continuum between a minimally acceptable ethical life and a fully ethical life. That doesn’t mean that they are constantly feeling guilty about not being morally perfect. Effective altruists don’t see a lot of point in feeling guilty. They prefer to focus on the good they are doing. Some of them are content to know they are doing something significant to make the world a better place. Many of them like to challenge themselves, to do a little better this year than last year.

Effective altruism is notable from several perspectives, each of which I will explore in the following pages. First, and most important, it is making a difference to the world. Philanthropy is a very large industry. In the United States alone there are almost one million charities, receiving a total of approximately $200 billion a year with an additional $100 billion donated to religious congregations. A small number of the charities are outright frauds, but a much bigger problem is that very few of them are sufficiently transparent to allow donors to judge whether they are really doing good. Most of that $300 billion is given on the basis of emotional responses to images of the people, animals, or forests that the charity is helping. Effective altruism seeks to change that by providing incentives for charities to demonstrate their effectiveness. Already the movement is directing millions of dollars to charities that are effectively reducing the suffering and death caused by extreme poverty. Second, effective altruism is a way of giving meaning to our own lives and finding fulfillment in what we do. Many effective altruists say that in doing good, they feel good. Effective altruists directly benefit others, but indirectly they often benefit themselves. Third, effective altruism sheds new light on an old philosophical and psychological question: Are we fundamentally driven by our innate needs and emotional responses, with our rational capacities doing little more than laying a justificatory veneer over actions that were already determined before we even started reasoning about what to do? Or can reason play a crucial role in determining how we live? What is it that drives some of us to look beyond our own interests and the interests of those we love to the interests of strangers, future generations, and animals? Finally, the emergence of effective altruism and the evident enthusiasm and intelligence with which many millennials at the outset of their careers are embracing it offer grounds for optimism about our future. There has long been skepticism about whether people can really be motivated by an altruistic concern for others. Some have thought that our moral capacities are limited to helping our kin, those with whom we are, or could be, in mutually beneficial relationships, and members of our own tribal group or small-scale society. Effective altruism provides evidence that this is not the case. It shows that we can expand our moral horizons, reach decisions based on a broad form of altruism, and employ our reason to assess

evidence about the likely consequences of our actions. In this way it allows us to hope that the coming generation, and those that follow it, will be able to meet the ethical responsibilities of a new era in which our problems will be global as well as local.

Acknowledgments The inspiration for this book has come from all who practice effective altruism—you are living refutations of the cynics who say that human beings are just not capable of living as if the well-being of strangers really matters. Your blend of concern for others and a commitment to act on the basis of reason and evidence has built the movement that is at the core of this book. I thank those of you mentioned in the book for allowing me to share your stories with a wider audience. In doing this, you are again following the evidence—in this case, research showing that people are more likely to help strangers when they know that others are doing the same. My immediate stimulus for taking up this topic was an invitation to give the Castle Lectures at Yale University. I am grateful to the Castle Lectures committee, chaired by Nicholas Sambanis, and to John Castle, who endowed the lectures. There is, as Mr. Castle pointed out over a post-lecture dinner, some tension between my views about donating to very wealthy universities and the fact that his endowment enabled me to present my arguments to hundreds of Yale undergraduates (and now, he could add, to a much wider audience) and thereby to influence their future actions. I very much hope that his gift will do more good than anything else he could have done with that amount of money, although I persist in thinking that, at the time he made it, he could not reasonably have predicted so fortunate an outcome. Many people have read drafts of the book, or parts of it, and offered helpful comments or responded to my queries. I want to thank, in particular, Anthony Appiah, Paul Bloom, Jon Bockman and Allison Smith for Animal Charity Evaluators, Paul van den Bosch for Give A Kidney, Nick Bostrom, Richard Butler-Bowdon, Di Franks for Living Kidney Donation, Holden Karnofsky for GiveWell, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Peter Hurford, Michael Liffman, Will MacAskill, Yaw Nyarko, Caleb Ontiveros, Toby Ord, Theron Pummer, Rob Reich, Susanne Roff, Agata Sagan, and

Aleksandra Taranow. Special thanks to Mona Fixdal, whose splendid assistance in the preparation of my online course “Practical Ethics” made it possible for me to devote more time to writing this book. Figures 1 and 2 are reprinted with the permission of Julia Wise; these illustrations were prepared by Bill Nelson. Finally, I thank the team at Yale University Press: Bill Frucht, my editor, for his constructive criticism throughout the process of writing the book; Lawrence Kenney, for his suggestions at the copyediting stage, Jaya Chatterjee, the assistant editor, and Margaret Otzel, the in-house production editor, for overseeing the production process. Some passages in the book draw on previously published work. I first wrote about “Batkid” in “Heartwarming causes are nice, but let’s give to charity with our heads,” Washington Post, December 20, 2013. Elements of my argument in chapter 11 appeared in “Good Charity, Bad Charity,” New York Times, August 11, 2013. Chapter 15 includes material that was previously published in “Preventing Human Extinction,” coauthored with Nick Beckstead and Matt Wage and available at: www.effectivealtruism.com/preventing-human-extinction. A fuller statement of the argument about the roles of reason and emotion in motivating altruism can be found in chapter 2 of Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, The Point of View of the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Peter Singer University Center for Human Values, Princeton University & School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne

PART ONE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM

1 What Is Effective Altruism? I met Matt Wage in 2009 when he took my Practical Ethics class at Princeton University. In the readings relating to global poverty and what we ought to be doing about it, he found an estimate of how much it costs to save the life of one of the millions of children who die each year from diseases that we can prevent or cure. This led Matt to calculate how many lives he could save, over his lifetime, assuming that he earned an average income and donated 10 percent of it to a highly effective organization, for example, one providing families with bednets to prevent malaria, a major killer of children. He discovered that he could, with that level of donation, save about one hundred lives. He thought to himself, “Suppose you see a burning building, and you run through the flames and kick a door open, and let one hundred people out. That would be the greatest moment in your life. And I could do as much good as that!”1 Two years later Matt graduated. His senior thesis received the Philosophy Department’s prize for the best thesis of the year. He was accepted by the University of Oxford for postgraduate study. Many students who major in philosophy dream of an opportunity like that—I know I did— but by then Matt had done a lot of thinking about and discussing with others what career would do the most good. This led him to a very different choice: he took a job on Wall Street, working for an arbitrage trading firm. On a higher income, he would be able to give much more, both as a percentage and in dollars, than 10 percent of a professor’s income. One year after graduating, Matt was donating a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings—to highly effective charities. He was on the way to saving a hundred lives, not over his entire career but within the first year or two of his working life and every year thereafter.

Matt is an effective altruist. His choice of career is one of several possible ways of being an effective altruist. Effective altruists do things like the following: • Living modestly and donating a large part of their income—often much more than the traditional tenth, or tithe—to the most effective charities; • Researching and discussing with others which charities are the most effective or drawing on research done by other independent evaluators; • Choosing the career in which they can earn most, not in order to be able to live affluently but so that they can do more good; • Talking to others, in person or online, about giving, so that the idea of effective altruism will spread; • Giving part of their body—blood, bone marrow, or even a kidney— to a stranger. In the following chapters, we will meet people who have done these things. What unites all these acts under the banner of effective altruism? The definition now becoming standard is “a philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason to working out the most effective ways to improve the world.”2 That definition says nothing about motives or about any sacrifice or cost to the effective altruist. Given that the movement has altruism as part of its name, these omissions may seem odd. Altruism is contrasted with egoism, which is concern only for oneself, but we should not think of effective altruism as requiring self-sacrifice, in the sense of something necessarily contrary to one’s own interests. If doing the most you can for others means that you are also flourishing, then that is the best possible outcome for everyone. As we shall see in chapter 9, many effective altruists deny that what they are doing is a sacrifice. Nevertheless they are altruists because their overriding concern is to do the most good they can. The fact that they find fulfillment and personal happiness in doing that does not detract from their altruism.

Psychologists who study giving behavior have noticed that some people give substantial amounts to one or two charities, while others give small amounts to many charities. Those who donate to one or two charities seek evidence about what the charity is doing and whether it is really having a positive impact. If the evidence indicates that the charity is really helping others, they make a substantial donation. Those who give small amounts to many charities are not so interested in whether what they are doing helps others—psychologists call them warm glow givers. Knowing that they are giving makes them feel good, regardless of the impact of their donation. In many cases the donation is so small—$10 or less—that if they stopped to think, they would realize that the cost of processing the donation is likely to exceed any benefit it brings to the charity. 3 In 2013, as the Christmas giving season approached, twenty thousand people gathered in San Francisco to watch a five-year-old boy dressed as Batkid ride around the city in a Batmobile with an actor dressed as Batman by his side. The pair rescued a damsel in distress and captured the Riddler, for which they received the keys of “Gotham City” from the mayor—not an actor, he really was the mayor of San Francisco—for their role in fighting crime. The boy, Miles Scott, had been through three years of chemotherapy for leukemia, and when asked for his greatest wish, he replied, “To be Batkid.” The Make-A-Wish Foundation had made his wish come true. Does that give you a warm glow? It gives me one, even though I know there is another side to this feel-good story. Make-A-Wish would not say how much it cost to fulfill Miles’s wish, but it did say that the average cost of making a child’s wish come true is $7,500.4 Effective altruists would, like anyone else, feel emotionally drawn toward making the wishes of sick children come true, but they would also know that $7,500 could, by protecting families from malaria, save the lives of at least three children and maybe many more. Saving a child’s life has to be better than fulfilling a child’s wish to be Batkid. If Miles’s parents had been offered that choice— Batkid for a day or a complete cure for their son’s leukemia—they surely would have chosen the cure. When more than one child’s life can be saved, the choice is even clearer. Why then do so many people give to Make-AWish, when they could do more good by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is a highly effective provider of bednets to families in

malaria-prone regions? The answer lies in part in the emotional pull of knowing that you are helping this child, one whose face you can see on television, rather than the unknown and unknowable children who would have died from malaria if your donation had not provided the nets under which they sleep. It also lies in part in the fact that Make-A-Wish appeals to Americans, and Miles is an American child. Effective altruists will feel the pull of helping an identifiable child from their own nation, region, or ethnic group but will then ask themselves if that is the best thing to do. They know that saving a life is better than making a wish come true and that saving three lives is better than saving one. So they don’t give to whatever cause tugs most strongly at their heartstrings. They give to the cause that will do the most good, given the abilities, time, and money they have available. Doing the most good is a vague idea that raises many questions. Here are a few of the more obvious ones, and some preliminary answers: What counts as “the most good”? Effective altruists will not all give the same answer to this question, but they do share some values. They would all agree that a world with less suffering and more happiness in it is, other things being equal, better than one with more suffering and less happiness. Most would say that a world in which people live longer is, other things being equal, better than one in which people live shorter lives. These values explain why helping people in extreme poverty is a popular cause among effective altruists. As we shall see in more detail in chapter 10, a given sum of money does much more to reduce suffering and save lives if we use it to assist people living in extreme poverty in developing countries than it would do if we gave it to most other charitable causes. Does everyone’s suffering count equally? Effective altruists do not discount suffering because it occurs far away or in another country or afflicts people of a different race or religion. They agree that the suffering of animals counts too and generally agree that we should not give less consideration to suffering just because the victim is not a member of our species. They may differ, however, on how to weigh the

type of suffering animals can experience against the type of suffering humans can experience.5 Does “the most good you can do” mean that it is wrong to give priority to one’s own children? Surely it can’t be wrong to put the interests of members of the family and close friends ahead of the interests of strangers? Effective altruists can accept that one’s own children are a special responsibility, ahead of the children of strangers. There are various possible grounds for this. Most parents love their children, and it would be unrealistic to require parents to be impartial between their own children and other children. Nor would we want to discourage such bias because children thrive in close, loving families, and it is not possible to love people without having greater concern for their well-being than one has for others. In any case, while doing the most good is an important part of the life of every effective altruist, effective altruists are real people, not saints, and they don’t seek to maximize the good in every single thing they do, 24/7. As we shall see, typical effective altruists leave themselves time and resources to relax and do what they want. For most of us, being close to our children and other family members or friends is central to how we want to spend our time. Nonetheless, effective altruists recognize that there are limits to how much they should do for their children, given the greater needs of others. Effective altruists do not think their children need all the latest toys or lavish birthday parties, and they reject the widespread assumption that parents should, on their death, leave virtually everything they own to their children rather than give a substantial part of their wealth to those who can benefit much more from it. What about other values, like justice, freedom, equality, and knowledge? Most effective altruists think that other values are good because they are essential for the building of communities in which people can live better lives, lives free of oppression, and have greater self-respect and freedom to do what they want as well as experience less suffering and premature death.6 No doubt some effective altruists hold that these values are also good for their own sake, independently of these consequences, but others do not.

Can promoting the arts be part of “the most good you can do”? In a world that had overcome extreme poverty and other major problems that face us now, promoting the arts would be a worthy goal. In the world in which we live, however, for reasons that will be explored in chapter 11, donating to opera houses and museums isn’t likely to be doing the most good you can. How many effective altruists could there be? Can everyone practice effective altruism? It’s possible for everyone who has some spare time or money to practice effective altruism. Unfortunately, most people—even, as we shall see in chapter 11, professional philanthropy advisors—don’t believe in thinking too much about the choice of causes to support. So it isn’t likely everyone will become an effective altruist anytime soon. The more interesting question is whether effective altruists can become numerous enough to influence the giving culture of affluent nations. There are some promising signs that that may be starting to happen. What if one’s act reduces suffering, but to do so one must lie or harm an innocent person? In general, effective altruists recognize that breaking moral rules against killing or seriously harming an innocent person will almost always have worse consequences than following these rules. Even thoroughgoing utilitarians, who judge actions to be right or wrong entirely on the basis of their consequences, are wary of speculative reasoning that suggests we should violate basic human rights today for the sake of some distant future good. They know that under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, a vision of a utopian future society was used to justify unspeakable atrocities, and even today some terrorists justify their crimes by imagining they will bring about a better future. No effective altruist wants to repeat those tragedies. Suppose I set up a factory in a developing country, paying wages that are better than local workers would otherwise earn and enough to lift them out of extreme poverty. Does that make me an effective altruist, even if I make a profit from the factory?

What are you going to do with your profits? If you decided to manufacture in the developing country in order to make it possible for people to escape extreme poverty, you will reinvest a substantial part of your profits in ways that help more people escape extreme poverty. Then you are an effective altruist. If, on the other hand, you use your profits to live as luxuriously as you can, the fact that you have benefited some of the poor is not sufficient to make you an effective altruist. There are all kinds of intermediate positions between these two extremes. Reinvesting some of your profits to help more people earn a decent income, while retaining enough to live at a much better level than your employees, puts you somewhere on the spectrum of effective altruism—you are living at least a minimally decent ethical life, even if not a perfect one. What about giving to your college or university? You teach at Princeton University, and this book is based on lectures you gave at Yale University, thanks to the generous gift of a Yale alumnus. Do you deny that giving to such institutions counts as effective altruism? I count myself fortunate to be teaching at one of the finest educational institutions in the world. This gives me the opportunity to teach very bright, hardworking students like Matt Wage, who are likely to have a disproportionately large influence on the world. For the same reason, I was pleased to accept the invitation to give the Castle Lectures at Yale. But Princeton has an endowment, at the time of writing, of $21 billion, and Yale’s is $23.9 billion. At the moment there are enough alumni donating to these universities to ensure that they will continue to be outstanding educational institutions, and the money you donate to one of them could probably do more good elsewhere. If effective altruism ever becomes so popular that these educational institutions are no longer able to do important research at a high level, it will be time to consider whether donating to them might once again be an effective form of altruism.7

2 A Movement Emerges Effective altruism is an offspring with many parents. I can claim to be one of them because in 1972, when I was a junior lecturer at University College, Oxford, I wrote an article called “Famine, Affluence and Morality” in which I argued that, given the great suffering that occurs during famines and similar disasters, we ought to give large proportions of our income to disaster relief funds. How much? There is no logical stopping place, I suggested, until we reach the point of marginal utility—that is, the point at which by giving more, one would cause oneself and one’s family to lose as much as the recipients of one’s aid would gain. Over the next forty plus years, the essay has been widely reprinted and used by professors around the world to challenge their students’ beliefs that they are living ethically. 1 Here’s the rub: even though I argued that this is what we ought to do, I did not do it myself. When I wrote the article, my wife and I were giving away about 10 percent of our modest income (she was working as a high school teacher, earning a little more than I was). That percentage increased over the years. We are now giving away about one-third of what we earn and aiming to get to half, but that still isn’t anywhere near the point of marginal utility. One of the things that made it psychologically difficult to increase our giving was that for many years we were giving away a bigger slice of our income than anyone we knew. No one, not even the megarich, seemed to be giving a higher proportion. Then in 2004 the New Yorker published a profile of Zell Kravinsky. Kravinsky had given almost his entire $45-million real estate fortune to charity. He did put some money into trust funds for his wife and children, but the children were attending public schools, and he and his family were living on about $60,000 a year. He still did not think he had done enough to help others, so he arranged with a nearby hospital to donate a kidney to a

stranger. The article linked my then-thirty-two-year-old essay to Kravinsky’s way of living and quoted him as saying, “It seems to me crystal clear that I should be giving all my money away and donating all of my time and energy.”2 By this time I was teaching at Princeton, not far from where Kravinsky lived, so I invited him to speak to one of my classes, something he has done regularly ever since. Kravinsky is a brilliant man: he has one doctorate in education and another on the poetry of John Milton. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania before turning from academic life to real estate investment, so he is at home in the university environment. Despite his interest in poetry, he puts his altruism in mathematical terms. Quoting scientific studies that show the risk of dying as a result of making a kidney donation to be only 1 in 4,000, he says that not making the donation would have meant he valued his life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a valuation he finds totally unjustified. He even told Ian Parker, the author of the New Yorker profile, that the reason many people don’t understand his desire to donate a kidney is that “they don’t understand math.” Around the time I was reading about Kravinsky I became aware of the work of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, professors of economics at MIT, who founded the Poverty Action Lab to carry out “social experiments”—by which they meant empirical research to discover which interventions against poverty work and which do not. Without such evidence, Duflo points out, we are fighting poverty the way medieval doctors fought illness by applying leeches.3 Banerjee and Duflo pioneered the application of randomized controlled trials, the golden standard of the pharmaceutical industry, to specific aid projects. By 2010 researchers associated with the Poverty Action Lab—now known as the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL—had carried out 240 experiments in 40 countries. Dean Karlan, once a student of Banerjee and Duflo and now himself a professor of economics at Yale, started Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit organization to bridge the gap between academic research and the practical side of development. Innovations for Poverty Action has grown to have a staff of nine hundred and a budget of $25 million, and the idea of randomized trials is clearly catching on.

In 2006 Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld were in their midtwenties, working for a hedge fund in Connecticut, and earning far more than they had any desire to spend. Together with some of their colleagues, they talked about giving significant amounts to charity—but to which charity? (The Poverty Action Lab and Innovations for Poverty Action evaluate specific interventions, such as distributing bednets to protect people against malaria, but not the charitable organizations themselves, most of which have several programs.) Karnofsky, Hassenfeld, and their colleagues were used to analyzing large amounts of data in order to find sound investments. They contacted several charities and asked them what a donation would accomplish. They got lots of glossy brochures with pictures of smiling children but no data that told them what the charities were achieving and at what cost. Calling the charities and explaining what they wanted to know got them no further. One charity told them that the information they were seeking was confidential. Karnofsky and Hassenfeld sensed a vacuum that needed to be filled. With financial support from their colleagues, they set up GiveWell, an organization that has taken the evaluation of charities to a new level. They soon found they could not run it part-time and so left the hedge fund, a move that cut their income by more than half. Their assumption is that if enough people follow the recommendations on GiveWell’s website, the charities will realize that it is in their interest to be transparent and to demonstrate their effectiveness. GiveWell estimates that in 2013 more than $17 million dollars went to its top-ranked charities as a result of those rankings. Although that is not enough to have a major impact on the charitable field as a whole, the figure has risen sharply each year since GiveWell was launched. GiveWell’s existence has been critical to the development of the effective altruism movement. Now, when skeptics ask, How do I know that my donation will really help people in need? there is a good reply: If you give to one of GiveWell’s top-rated charities, you can be confident that your donation will do good and be highly cost-effective.4 Around the time Karnofsky and Hassenfeld were setting up GiveWell, Toby Ord was studying philosophy at the University of Oxford. As an undergraduate, Ord, an Australian, had initially studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Melbourne, but he often got into

arguments about ethical and political issues. When he expressed his views about poverty, his friends would retort, “If you believe that, why don’t you just give most of your money to people starving in Africa?” His friends thought that this conclusion was absurd, but Toby asked himself, “If my money could help others much more than it helps me, then why not?” Ord’s growing interest in ethics led him to do a second undergraduate degree in philosophy. He did so well that he got a scholarship to Oxford, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on how we should decide what to do. He remained interested in practical ethics, and read my article “Famine, Affluence and Morality.” He began to think seriously about what he could do for people in extreme poverty. At the time he was living quite comfortably on his graduate student scholarship, which paid him £14,000 a year, a sum that put him, he noticed, in the richest 4 percent of the world’s people, even after adjusting for how much further money goes in developing countries.5 When he graduated he would be earning more. He decided to calculate how much he would be able to give away over his lifetime, after meeting his own needs, assuming he earned a standard academic salary. His earnings, he estimated, might come to £1.5 million, or US$2.5 million (in 2005 dollars), and of this, he thought he could donate two-thirds, that is, £1 million, or US$1.7 million. Then he asked himself what that sum could achieve if it were donated to the most effective charities. He estimated that, while maintaining an attractive quality of life, he could donate enough to cure eighty thousand people of blindness or to save around fifty thousand years of healthy life.6 In other words, his donations would achieve the equivalent of saving the lives of one thousand children, each of whom would live another fifty years in good health, or of enabling five thousand people to live an extra ten healthy years. Such benefits so dramatically outweighed the small sacrifice Ord imagined he would be making that he committed himself to living on £20,000 per annum (adjusted for inflation and equivalent to US$34,000) and giving away the rest. His wife, Bernadette Young, a physician, pledged to give away everything above £25,000 (US$42,600). Ord subsequently lowered his own allowance to £18,000 (US$30,600), as he found that £20,000 was more than he needed to live comfortably and even take a holiday in France or Italy. 7

Ord wanted to share his knowledge of how easy it is to make a huge positive difference to the world. In 2009 he and Will MacAskill, another Oxford philosophy graduate student, founded Giving What We Can, an international society dedicated to eliminating poverty in the developing world. Members pledge to give at least 10 percent of their income to wherever they think it will do the most to relieve suffering in the developing world. At the time of writing, 644 people have taken the pledge, and Giving What We Can estimates that if the donors all do what they have pledged to do, $309 million will go to the most effective charities.8 In addition to helping Ord launch Giving What We Can, MacAskill had an idea for another organization. Students and other young people get plenty of career advice, but none of it is directed toward the question an effective altruist would ask: What career will enable me to do the most good over my lifetime? In 2011 MacAskill and five friends founded 80,000 Hours, so named because that is roughly the number of hours people spend working in their careers. 80,000 Hours does research on which careers do the most good, offers free career coaching, and is building a global community of people seeking to change the world for the better. 9 (Curious about the careers 80,000 Hours recommends? Wait for chapters 4 and 5.) The term effective altruism was born when Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours decided to apply for charitable status under a common umbrella organization. The umbrella organization needed a name. After tossing around some names, including High Impact Alliance and Evidencebased Charity Association, the group took a vote, and Centre for Effective Altruism was the clear winner. Effective altruism soon caught on and became the term for the entire movement.10 While these developments were taking place, I continued to write about our obligations to help people in great need. In 1999 and 2006 I published essays in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The response to the second article was so positive that I developed it into a book, The Life You Can Save, which appeared in 2009. In the final chapter I suggested a progressive scale of giving, like a tax scale, where the amount you give increases as your income increases. As compared with Giving What You Can’s flat 10 percent pledge, my suggestion is for a lower level of giving for average income earners but a higher one for those with high incomes. Agata Sagan,

a Polish researcher and supporter of the ideas in the book, set up a website so that people can pledge online to meet the level of donation suggested for their income. So far, more than seventeen thousand people have taken this pledge. Gradually the website evolved into an organization, which really took off when I got an email from Charlie Bresler. Charlie and his wife, Diana Schott, are representative of those who, nearing the age when people traditionally retired from paid employment, are thinking about what they want to do with the next ten, twenty, or even thirty years of useful life they may still have left. As students in the sixties, Charlie and Diana had been active in the movement against the war in Vietnam and for a transformation of political life in the United States. When it became apparent that the system was more resistant to reform than they had hoped, Diana became a physician while Charlie earned a doctorate in psychology. After spending some time as a professor of psychology he stumbled—his word—into becoming president of Men’s Wearhouse, a major national clothing chain. That increased his income, but in the back of their minds Charlie and Diana retained the idea that after they had raised their family they would do something to make the world a better place. Charlie read The Life You Can Save and decided that helping people in extreme poverty would be worthy of his time and energy. He is now the unpaid executive director of The Life You Can Save. In 2013, the first year in which the organization was fully operational, it conservatively estimated that, on a budget of $147,000, it had moved $594,000 to highly effective charities, yielding a “return on investment” of more than 400 percent.11

PART TWO HOW TO DO THE MOST GOOD

3 Living Modestly to Give More Toby Ord’s calculation of how much good he would be able to do over his lifetime shows that it is possible to do an immense amount of good without earning a lot. Julia Wise is an effective altruist who has managed, on quite a modest wage, to give surprisingly large amounts to effective charities. Her blog, Giving Gladly, provides insights into how she does it. She quotes a friend who said to her, “It sounds very dreary, living on rice and beans and never going out to a movie.” She then explains that that isn’t how she lives.1 Fig. 1. Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman’s budget, August 2013–July 2014. Julia and her partner, Jeff Kaufman, met in college. They had little space or money, and much of their enjoyment came from spending time with their friends. When they married in 2009 they talked about how they

would live and agreed that they would continue to live modestly so they could give something, even on a low income, and as their earnings increased they would give more. Julia is a social worker, and Jeff is a computer programmer. Their combined income was under $40,000 in 2008, but since then a sharp increase in Jeff’s earnings has brought it to $261,416 for the year ending July 2014. In each of these years from 2008 to 2014, with one exception when Julia was saving to pay her way through graduate school, Julia and Jeff have donated at least a third of their income, and as their income rose they have given half. Julia made a diagram of what they did with their money in the year ending July 2014 (fig. 1). Julia and Jeff saved money by using public transit rather than owning a car. Their housing expenses are low because they rent part of a house, but they expect these costs to go up once they buy their own house. They are saving for that and also for retirement and future expenses related to their child. Nevertheless, they were able to donate half their income and plan to continue doing that in future.2 Julia realizes that she benefits because Jeff has above-average earnings, but she knows what it is like to live on not much more than the median income in the United States, as she and Jeff had to do it only a few years ago. So she offers a hypothetical model of what she might spend and donate if she were forced to live on the $35,000 she earned on her own in 2013–14, which is close to the median personal income in the United States (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Budget for a single person living in the Boston area on $35,000 a year. Julia offers the following as a realistic breakdown of expenses: • $900 on rent and $100 on utilities each month (enough for a small apartment or an apartment shared with friends in the Boston area) • $150 a month on groceries (more than Julia spends) • $300 a month for health insurance and other medical costs • $70 for a public transit pass • $250 a month for personal spending (phone, clothes, entertainment, etc.) • Saving 10 percent of income • Donating 10 percent of income A person living on the median income can, therefore, donate 10 percent to effective charities, save 10 percent for the future, and still have enough to live comfortably and enjoyably. How Much Is Enough? As a small child Julia Wise grasped that although she did not lack anything she needed, there were others who did. Ever since, she has seen every dollar she spends as a dollar taken out of the hands of someone who needs it more than she does. So the question she asks herself is not how much she should give, but how much she should keep. Julia is not a Catholic, but her account of her early insight echoes the words of Ambrose, a fourth-century archbishop of Milan who was later canonized and became known as one of the four original Great Doctors of the Roman Catholic Church. Ambrose said that when you give to the poor, “You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself.”3 That became part of the Christian tradition: Thomas Aquinas went so far as to say, “It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need.”4 Surprisingly to some, the Roman Catholic Church has never repudiated this radical view and has even reiterated it on several occasions. Pope Paul VI quoted the passage in

which Ambrose says that what you give to the poor is really already theirs and added, in his encyclical Populorum Progressio, “We must repeat once more that the superfluous wealth of rich countries should be placed at the service of poor nations. The rule which up to now held good for the benefit of those nearest to us, must today be applied to all the needy of this world.” On the twentieth anniversary of Populorum Progressio, Pope John Paul II said it again, in his encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, and Pope Francis has indicated his support for this doctrine too.5 The problem is that these are just words until the Church puts the full weight of its moral authority behind them. Popes, bishops, and priests are quick to condemn supposed sins like the use of contraception, homosexual acts, and abortion, but they are much less willing to speak out against the blatant failures of wealthy Catholics to give to the poor what the Church says is owed to them. The Church’s teachings on poverty are in accord with the Gospel account of the reply Jesus gave to the rich man who told Jesus that he had, since childhood, kept all the commandments and wanted to know what else he should do to go to heaven. “One thing you lack,” Jesus is described as having said to him. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor.”6 Aaron Moore, an Australian international aid worker and artist, is one of the relatively few Christians who have taken the words of Jesus seriously. On his website, Moore links them to a statement of mine: “If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”7 Aaron was not rich, by Australian standards—he didn’t own a house or a car—but when he entered his income on www.globalrichlist.com, it told him he was in the top 1 percent of the world by income. So at the age of thirty-four, Aaron put all the larger items he owned—his motorbike, laptop, mobile phone, surfboard, wetsuit, and paintings—up for auction, with no reserve, and opening bids of one cent. They all sold. Most of the rest of his possessions were put on exhibit in a Sydney gallery space that was made to look like his home. Other items that he assumed would not sell, like his used underwear and his inscribed under–12 soccer trophies, were donated to the local Salvation Army store. Aaron gave the proceeds of the sale to the poor, along with all the money that was in his bank accounts. He left the gallery owning nothing but the clothes he was wearing. He wanted to experience what it would be like to

put Jesus’s words into action, and he hoped to start a discussion about the responsibilities of the affluent to the global poor. Is it okay, he asked, for us to be going to the movies and drinking chai lattes while 1.4 billion people are living in extreme poverty?8 Aaron’s act was part symbolic statement and part experiment in living according to the words of Jesus. It was not intended to set a standard either for what everyone should do or for how he planned to live the rest of his life. Today, Aaron has a modest amount of possessions and sets aside a portion of his earnings to donate each month. That’s more in keeping with effective altruism than with what Jesus said to the rich man, because giving everything one owns to the poor is going to make it hard to earn more and thus to give more. You need to dress respectably to get a job, and today you may need a laptop and a smartphone too. The best way of maximizing the amount you can give will depend on your individual circumstances and skills, but trying to live without at least a modest level of comfort and convenience is likely to be counterproductive. Having Children When Julia was young she felt so strongly that her choice to donate or not donate meant the difference between someone else living or dying that she decided it would be immoral for her to have children. They would take too much of her time and money. She told her father of her decision, and he replied. “It doesn’t sound like this lifestyle is going to make you happy,” to which she responded, “My happiness is not the point.” Later, when she was with Jeff, she realized that her father was right. Her decision not to have a child was making her miserable. She talked to Jeff, and they decided they could afford to raise a child and still give plenty. The fact that Julia could look forward to being a parent renewed her sense of excitement about the future. She suspects that her satisfaction with her life makes her of more use to the world than she would be if she were “a broken-down altruist.” Everyone has boundaries. If you find yourself doing something that makes you bitter, it is time to reconsider. Is it possible for you to become more positive about it? If not, is it really for the best, all things considered? George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, urged his followers to be an example to others and to “walk cheerfully over the world.” Julia refers to that thought, saying, “We don’t need people

making sacrifices that leave them drained and miserable. We need people who can walk cheerfully over the world, or at least do their damnedest.”9 There are still relatively few effective altruists, so it is important that they set an example that attracts others to this way of living. Julia spoke to my class at Princeton, and she did present a cheerful image of a person thoroughly enjoying her chosen lifestyle.10 She referred to the ability she and Jeff have to save hundreds of lives and improve many more as “an amazing opportunity.”11 In responding to a question asked by a student, she said she does not tell others who spend a lot on themselves and give nothing away that their lifestyle is immoral because, “you can’t change people by preaching at them.” Julia admits to making mistakes. When shopping, she would constantly ask herself, “Do I need this ice cream as much as a woman living in poverty elsewhere in the world needs to get her child vaccinated?” That made grocery shopping a maddening experience, so she and Jeff made a decision about what they would give away over the next six months and then drew up a budget based on what was left. Within that budget, they regarded the money as theirs, to spend on themselves. Now Julia doesn’t scrimp on ice cream because, as she told the class, “Ice cream is really important to my happiness.” Another error was telling her parents and her grandmother that she did not want Christmas presents and would sell them if they gave her any. That made her grandmother, in particular, really unhappy. Julia is not so hardline now. At first her financially conservative parents had some concerns about how much she and Jeff were giving away, but once they saw that Julia was not, as they had feared, “living in a cardboard box” they became more positive about it. For both Jeff and herself, Julia says, strong social ties to family and to friends are a basic source of happiness. (No surprise there, as most studies of happiness reach the same conclusion.) Julia and Jeff have other sources of enjoyment that cost little or nothing: “Cooking, walking, playing board games, and making music with family and friends.” Julia and Jeff began leading an effective altruism discussion group, and the development of a community of effective altruists in the Boston area has given them a new source of pleasure: meeting people who think as they do and continuing to

have the kind of deep, stimulating conversations many people have only during their university days.12 Julia’s and Jeff’s decision to have a child shows that they drew a line beyond which they would not let the goal of maximizing their giving prevent them from having something very important to them. Bernadette Young, Toby Ord’s partner, has described their decision to have a child in a similar way: “I’m happy donating 50 percent of my income over my life, but if I also chose not to have a child simply to raise that amount to 55 percent, then that final 5 percent would cost me more than all the rest. ... I’m deciding to meet a major psychological need and to plan a life I can continue to live in the long term.” Neither Julia nor Bernadette is unusual in experiencing the inability to have a child—for whatever reason—as deeply distressing.13 Having a child undoubtedly takes both money and time, but against this, Bernadette points out, effective altruists can reasonably hope that having a child will benefit the world. Both cognitive abilities and characteristics like empathy have a significant inherited component, and we can also expect that children will be influenced by the values their parents hold and practice in their daily lives. Although there can be no certainty that the children of effective altruists will, over their lifetimes, do more good than harm, there is a reasonable probability that they will, and this helps to offset the extra costs of raising them.14 We can put it another way: If all those who are concerned to do the most good decide not to have children, while those who do not care about anyone else continue to have children, can we really expect that, a few generations on, the world will be a better place than it would have been if those who care about others had had children? As the time for the birth of Julia’s daughter neared, she speculated on how being a mother would change her. Some of her friends had suggested that once she had her own child she would not keep up her level of giving. Julia replied that her daughter will not want for anything she really needs, but she rejected the idea that her responsibility is limited to doing her best for her own child. Having her own child, she said, would bring her closer to “the Other Woman”—the mother who has to struggle to give her child clean water and enough to eat. That woman, she knew, loves her child as she loves her own.15

Meet Some More Effective Altruists In the remainder of this chapter and the one that follows I introduce you to several more effective altruists. My aim is to show that, notwithstanding the skepticism about altruism mentioned in the preface, many diverse kinds of people become effective altruists. In addition, these brief sketches will provide a basis for my subsequent exploration, in chapters 6, 7, and 8, of what motivates effective altruists and how they feel about the change that effective altruism has brought to their lives. Rhema Hokama demonstrates what it is like to be an effective altruist on a very modest income. She heard of effective altruism during her later years in college and decided she would start giving when she got her first paycheck. She is studying for her doctorate in English literature at Harvard, and her income from teaching, research stipends, and freelance editorial and writing work amounts to around $27,000 a year. Rhema began by donating 2 percent of her income and has gradually been increasing that percentage. At the time of writing, it is 5 percent. She has set up a separate donation account, and each month, on receiving her salary, she transfers 5 percent to that account. At the end of the year, she will donate it. Rents are high in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard University is located, so to live within her salary and still have something to give, Rhema rents an apartment outside the city but close enough to where she works that she doesn’t need to own a car. Instead, she walks, rides a bike, or uses public transport. Unlike many of her colleagues, she brings her lunch from home rather than eating out. Rhema thinks her income, even after giving, is quite adequate. She likes to remind herself that it is sixteen times the average global income of $1,680 a year and places her in the world’s richest 4.4 percent.16 In other words, of the world’s approximately 7.2 billion people, about 6.9 billion of them earn less than Rhema does. In any case, the income Rhema now earns is comparable to her household income when she was growing up in Hawaii, where she was born into a large working family—the children and grandchildren of pineapple and sugarcane plantation workers. Her relatives now work as hotel busboys, office assistants, newspaper distributors, construction workers, warehouse truck drivers, privates in the U.S. Army,

call operators, grocery cashiers, nurses, and servers at McDonald’s. Growing up, she didn’t know anyone who made more than $50,000 a year. At Harvard she knows very few people who grew up in a family making less than $100,000 a year, and her friends and colleagues can’t really imagine living on less than they have. One of them, earning an amount similar to Rhema’s, complained that she was living below the poverty line when in fact she was earning almost three times the United States poverty line of $11,490 for a single person. Rhema has donated to Oxfam and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Last year she donated to the Fistula Foundation, which, for about $450, performs surgery to repair obstetric fistulas—a condition that causes young women who have had problems during labor to leak urine and feces through the vagina, as a result of which they often become social outcasts for the rest of their lives. Rhema says that “giving back a portion of my earnings is the least I can do to help other women receive the necessary surgeries for injuries that are almost nonexistent in the developed world.” She acknowledges feeling that her good fortune “is not fundamentally the product of my own doing.” Giving helps relieve any guilt that might arise from that thought because it makes Rhema feel that “in some small way, I’m working toward building the kind of world I would want to live in.”17 When Celso Vieira was a child growing up in a small city in Brazil, his parents were told he had a cognitive disability, probably autism. The signs were clear: he speaks slowly, uses language in an odd way, and cannot look people in the eye. His parents were advised to put him in a special school. Instead, they bribed the director of a local normal school to accept him. To everyone’s surprise, his grades always put him at the top of his class. He now speaks nine languages and is writing a thesis on Plato for his doctorate in philosophy. In 2008, after reading my Practical Ethics, he became a vegan and started donating 10 percent of his modest income, at first to Unicef and Oxfam, but later, after doing more research on effectiveness, to other charities, including Innovations for Poverty Action. He plans to raise his level of donations to 20 percent. He lives very simply, not only to have more to donate but also to reduce his impact on the environment. He rents a room in a shared house and has no television or refrigerator. He eats grains and fresh vegetables. In 2014, when he moved to a different place to live,

his possessions consisted of a mattress, a guitar, a skateboard, a computer, a chair, a tiny table, and a backpack that contained all his clothes except the ones he was wearing. In addition to writing his thesis, studying a language, practicing his guitar, and writing children’s books, a novel for adults, short stories, and a translation of Plato’s Cratylus that preserves the puns most translators consider to be untranslatable, Celso is an effective altruist. In Belo Horizonte, where he lives, he started the first Brazilian chapter of The Life You Can Save. The group encourages people to pledge to donate to effective charities, holds fund-raising events, and devises strategies to make it easier for them to fulfill their pledges. Celso is an example of the spread of effective altruism beyond its origins in the United Kingdom and the United States. His unusual personality also affords insights that improve our understanding of the motives of effective altruists, which I shall examine in chapters 7 and 8. Celso is, as he says, “more moved by arguments than by empathy.” He has come to effective altruism through reasoning about what he ought to do. Priya Basil followed a more fortuitous path to effective altruism. She knows both poor countries and rich ones, for she grew up in Kenya, though in what she describes as “a bubble of privilege.” Her grandparents did not have it so easy. They came from India during the period of the British Raj to work on building the Kenyan railways. Her parents were born in Kenya but moved to the United Kingdom after Kenya became independent. They were educated in Britain and returned to Kenya when Priya was a baby. Despite being surrounded by extreme poverty, Priya did not reflect on the inequality she saw. It was only when she was in her late teens that a sudden collapse in her family’s fortunes made her face up to the unfair distribution of wealth. Her family returned to Britain, where she went to university and studied literature and then got a job in advertising. Though now more aware of the suffering of others, she still didn’t think it was incumbent on her to alleviate it. That changed when she fell in love with a man who believes we all have a responsibility to make the world better. She moved to Germany to live with him and started to write her first novel, Ishq and Mushq. Now she was compelled to live frugally, and that gave her a sense of how it was possible to be happy—perhaps even happier—with less. Her writing drew

on her immigrant background, which led her to confront the ignorance of her childhood and adolescence in Kenya. In this frame of mind she read The Life You Can Save and took the pledge on the website. Her second novel, The Obscure Logic of the Heart, refers to some of the ideas that led her to give, and she is currently writing a third novel that will also express ideas related to effective altruism. Perhaps because of her own path to effective altruism, Priya is acutely aware of the fact that the circumstances we’re in and the people around us play a big role in determining our values and behavior. She admits that, as she puts it, “my default setting is ‘Me First’ and it’s a constant struggle not to let this impulse override every decision.” Given that and her susceptibility to the temptations of shopping, she feels it is easier for her to be a better person more of the time in Germany than in the United Kingdom because consumption in Germany is not quite as brazen as in Britain (she hasn’t lived in the United States!). At the same time, she believes, “altruism needs to be watched, challenged and nurtured, otherwise it risks becoming stale and automatic.” She has been giving 5 percent of her income to effective charities, with something of a bias toward charities working in Kenya because of her connections there. That level of giving, for someone on her income, meets the requirements of The Life You Can Save pledge, but Priya is pushing herself to increase it to 10 percent. In addition to giving, Priya and her partner cofounded an organization called Authors for Peace, and she has been involved in other political initiatives, including Writers Against Mass Surveillance. Although she acknowledges that the effectiveness of these political initiatives is difficult to determine, she believes that by working to better any one society we increase the chance of betterment for all societies. Effective altruism is something for people of many divergent backgrounds and for people who, while living in affluent societies, earn no more and sometimes even less than the average income in their society. They can, by giving, say, 10 percent of their income to effective charities, save lives or restore sight or in other ways make a huge difference to the lives of people who may be living on an income that is, in purchasing power, the equivalent of as little as 1 or 2 percent of the median income in the United States.

4 Earning to Give Although it is possible to earn an average income and still donate enough to do a lot of good, it remains true that the more you earn, the more you can donate. That idea, which led Matt Wage to his current career, must have occurred to many people before the effective altruism movement existed. In the eighteenth century John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, told his congregations to “earn all you can, give all you can, save all you can.”1 Another was Jim Greenbaum, who heard the term effective altruism when viewing, on TED.com, a talk I had given in 2013. He realized that now there is a name for what he had been doing for most of his life. Because Jim has been quite deliberately earning money in order to be able to give money away for longer than anyone else I know, his life demonstrates that this can be done successfully over several decades. Jim was born in 1958 and grew up in a Jewish family living in Louisiana, in the heart of America’s Bible Belt. As a child, he recalls, “when something didn’t seem reasonable, logical, or fair, I’d fight against it.” He saw footage of the Nazi concentration camps and heard rabbis give sermons and say, “Never again!” They would condemn the Allies for doing nothing to stop the Holocaust, while newspapers carried stories of atrocities still being committed around the world. The hypocrisy began to gnaw at him, and that influence can still be seen in a line he uses on the website of the foundation he set up: “Being a bystander to suffering is not an option.” When Jim graduated from college, he was thinking of going to law school with the goal of practicing civil rights law. But he didn’t get into the top law schools and didn’t fancy another three years’ study somewhere that was not at the highest level, so he decided to go into business, make money quickly, and use it to change the world. After some false starts, he founded Access Long Distance, which grew into a nationwide telecommunications

company. In 1990, when Jim was thirty-two, he happened to catch a television program about an American who had gone to Romania to help orphans who were living in atrocious conditions. Jim set himself a deadline: eight more years in business would take him to forty, and then he would quit and start using his money to help others. He missed the deadline but not by much: when he sold his company in 1999 he had just turned fortyone, and his net worth was about to peak at $133 million. He has committed to contributing 85 percent of that during his lifetime to projects aimed at reducing the suffering of both humans and nonhuman animals, with the remainder of his wealth going to the same purpose after his death. So far he has contributed more than $40 million to the Greenbaum Foundation, which he runs together with his wife, Lucie Berreby-Greenbaum. The foundation has supported projects aimed at preventing and alleviating animal suffering and abuse, improving health in developing countries, educating people in Africa about human rights, and rescuing victims of human trafficking for sex and labor. Compared to the other effective altruists we have met, Jim lives an affluent life and lives in a luxurious home. He once owned a few sports cars and a share in a private jet but soon came to see those as excesses. While he now drives a Toyota, he still struggles to find a balance between his lifestyle and using his money to help others. As early as 2003, before effectiveness was as widely talked about as it is today, Jim was mostly supporting overseas projects. When he was asked for donations to local projects, he would say, “I can give you this much money, or I can save this many lives. You tell me what to do.”2 Nevertheless, he is very conscious of the need, when motivating wealthy people to give, to start where they are, so he accepts some “ineffective passion” in their giving, as long as at least half goes to effective giving. How does earning a lot of money and giving a lot away compare with becoming an aid worker for an effective charity? Will MacAskill puts forward this argument: Suppose you could have worked for an effective charity but instead you accept a job with an investment bank that pays you $200,000 a year. There is usually no shortage of applicants for jobs with charities, so the charity will appoint someone else who will probably do almost as good a job as you would have done. “Almost” because if you had

been offered the job, we can assume the charity considered you the best applicant for the position; but the difference between you and the next-best applicant is unlikely to be great. As a charity worker, therefore, you are largely replaceable. Working in finance, however, you earn much more than you need and give half of your earnings to the charity, which can use that money to employ two extra workers it would not, without your donation, have been able to employ at all. The amount of work they can do for the charity will greatly exceed the difference between what you would have done and what the next-best applicant for your position will do. Whereas you would have been replaceable as a charity worker, you are not replaceable as a donor. If you had not taken the job with the investment bank, someone else would have and almost certainly would not have donated half of her or his salary to charity (very few people in the finance sector do). So if you take the finance job, the charity will be better able to achieve its aims than it would have been if you had accepted their offer of employment.3 Will also points out that we sometimes learn that a charity is not as effective as we thought it was. Donors can then easily switch their giving to a better charity. If you are already working for the charity when you find out that it is not particularly effective, however, it will not be easy to find a new job with the most effective charity. If you are able to change the charity that employs you, making it more effective than it was, you may have a bigger impact still; but many organizations, whether charities or not, are resistant to change. Notwithstanding exceptions like Jim Greenbaum, most of those earning to give are from the generation that started to think about their career choices around the turn of the millennium. They have been prepared to go in new directions. In the nineties if you had said that you were going into finance in order to earn more to give more, people would have looked at you oddly, and you would have felt very alone in what you were doing. For millennials, however, connecting with like-minded people via social media comes naturally. So it is easy to find websites on which you can exchange experiences with people like Aveek Bhattacharya, who put aside plans for an academic career in order to earn more and donate more with a Londonbased firm of strategy consultants. Or you may meet Alex Foster, whose

Christian beliefs led him to want to do something about poverty. Alex is now launching his own company and is committed to donating everything he earns above £15,000 a year. 4 If you are earning to give in order to reduce animal suffering, you can discuss the best options with Simon Knutson, who works for an investment company in Gothenburg, Sweden, and donates about 40 percent of his after-tax income to support Animal Charity Evaluators, which tries to find the most effective charities helping animals. Ben West, after being employed as a software developer in Madison, Wisconsin, started his own company in order to be able to donate more. He gives to Animal Charity Evaluators and the Global Priorities Project at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which investigates the problem of how to allocate scarce resources among different global needs. In the popular mind, altruism would not rank high among the characteristics of a professional poker player. That may be about to change. Philipp Gruissem won enough at poker to live the kind of life that celebrity magazines encourage us to fantasize about. For five years he was able to travel where he wanted and enjoyed the freedom to experience life in many ways. The time came, though, when he realized that the life he was leading was not satisfying him. To be happy, he needed some larger purpose in his life. Swiss friends introduced him to effective altruism, and he found a new motivation for playing poker that led him to his biggest wins, including a total of nearly $2.4 million in two tournaments in 2013. Now Gruissem is spreading effective charity among other professional poker players with a new organization called Raising for Effective Giving.5 These people are all giving far beyond conventional standards of philanthropy, but of all the effective altruists I have encountered, Ian Ross offers the most remarkable example of a life committed to maximizing giving. Ian started working full-time in 2006 and between then and the time of writing has donated or earmarked for future donation about $1 million. In 2014 he earned more than $400,000, and more than 95 percent of his aftertax earnings goes to charities. The ethical motivation for Ian’s lifestyle began in college, when he became a vegan. For the best part of the next decade, a friend, also vegan, subjected him to merciless cross-examination. The outcome was that Ian came to accept the following argument: 1. Modern animal agriculture causes an immense amount of suffering.

2. We are responsible both for what we do and for what we refrain from doing. 3. We have the means to reduce the suffering caused by modern animal agriculture. Therefore: 4. It is imperative for each of us to do so. Ian then began to put that logic into practice in his own life. He worked for four years at McKinsey, the management consultants, and then at the Disney Corporation before moving to a more senior role in a video gaming startup. Outside his day job, Ian helped start Hampton Creek Foods, which produces plant-based egg substitutes that are already cutting into the demand for eggs from caged hens. The majority of his donations go to organizations like the Humane League and Mercy for Animals because their education and outreach campaigns have been shown to be effective in encouraging people to stop eating animal products. Ian also gives to global public health organizations like Population Services International because he sees bringing family planning to people without access to it as win-win, preventing the birth of unwanted children and giving adults more control over their lives. At the same time, because most humans eat meat, fewer children means less demand for animal products, which in turn reduces animal suffering. Ian can focus on his goal of reducing suffering because he doesn’t have a partner or children and has no plans to change that situation. He doesn’t see this as a sacrifice because his lack of interest in having a partner predates his effort to follow his ethical ideas to their logical conclusions. He plays soccer with friends, enjoys listening to music, and goes cycling most weekends, all within an annual budget of around $9,000. Outside that budget, though, he did spend $8,000 to pay the veterinary expenses for the companion animal of a friend with whom he is very close. He admits he can’t really justify this, so he considers it a kind of “luxury spending.” The Psychology of Earning to Give In 2013 an article in the Washington Post featured Jason Trigg, an MIT computer science graduate working in finance and giving half of his salary to the Against Malaria Foundation. Trigg was described as part of “an emerging class of young professionals in America and Britain” for whom

“making gobs of money is the surest way to save the world.”6 In the New York Times the columnist David Brooks wrote that Trigg seemed to be “an earnest, morally serious young man” who might well save many lives. Nevertheless, Brooks urged caution. He warned, first, that our daily activities change us, and by working in a hedge fund your ideals could slip so that you become less committed to giving. Second, he thought that choosing a profession that does not arouse your passion for the sake of an “abstract, faraway good” might leave you loving humanity in general but not the particular humans around you. Third, and most important, Brooks worried about “turning yourself into a means rather than an end ... a machine for the redistribution of wealth.” Taking a job just to make money could be “corrosive,” Brooks wrote, even if you use the money for charity. 7 The first two objections make factual psychological claims that can be checked against people who are earning to give. The third objection is moral, rather than psychological, so I will postpone discussion of it until we come to ethical objections in the next section. In 2013 Matt Wage spoke to the Princeton class he had taken four years earlier. He told the students that when he went to work in finance some people raised concerns about his unusual choice. One worry was that an idealistic young person surrounded by cutthroat bankers wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure and would quit. That hadn’t happened. Matt doesn’t regard the people he works with as cutthroats, and he finds the work itself interesting. The other major concern was one that Brooks mentions, which Matt put as follows: “By being around a lot of wealthy people who drive Ferraris, I would soon say, never mind about the charities, what I really want is a Ferrari.” A Ferrari is still not on Matt’s shopping list. His strategy for trying to prevent it ever getting there is to be very public about his pledge to donate 50 percent of his income. He has told all his friends that if he doesn’t keep his pledge, they should ridicule him. (He has also given permission for his pledge to be mentioned in this book, making it even more public.) Overall, though, Matt gave no signs of being under any unusual psychological burden caused by earning to give. “I’m extremely happy with my life,” he told me. “I’d still do this altruistic stuff even if I thought it was making my life worse, but, by a strange coincidence about how human minds work, I think it’s actually making me happier.”

Jim Greenbaum found his initial years frustrating, but only because it was taking him longer than he expected to create the wealth he needed to help others. It did not make him less committed to his ultimate goal. He enjoyed business, which in some ways seemed to him like a game. He also valued the people with whom he worked. He advocates balance between a comfortable life and doing good. Jim has already given away so much that his decision to earn money in order to give it away has obviously worked out very well. Ben West points out that even from a selfish perspective, earning to give allows you to have things that people believe make them happy, like money and a high-status job, while still getting the fulfillment that comes from knowing you are helping to make the world a better place. Ian Ross doesn’t see any risk of burnout and anticipates continuing along his current path. Alex Foster may be the most enthusiastic of all the earning-to-give people I have had contact with: he says he finds his career “insanely fulfilling— more satisfaction than any other period of my life. Despite heavily reduced social life.” On the other hand, Aveek Bhattacharya is sometimes frustrated that his work does not allow him to probe issues as deeply as he would like. He always saw earning to give as an experiment, and, to him, the possibility of doing a doctorate and having an academic career remains open.8 Brooks would be on solid ground if he were merely warning his readers that earning to give is not for everyone. Some people can’t work up much enthusiasm for making profits for their employer. Others, however, seem to enjoy earning money and thrive on the extra motivation provided by giving a large slice of it to good causes. They thus avoid the problem nicely summed up in a New Yorker cartoon in which a businessman on the phone complains, “I’m working harder than I ever have, but all I get out of it is larger and larger paychecks.”9 Brooks speculates on the damage that could flow from turning yourself into a means for the redistribution of wealth, overlooking the fact that it is, unfortunately, the fate of many people to spend their lives supporting themselves and their families by doing work they do not find intrinsically interesting or enjoyable. Why would such work have a more corrosive effect on you if you are doing it in order to help others rather than to help yourself and your family?

The Ethics of Earning to Give When Brooks objects to earning to give on the grounds that you are turning yourself into a means rather than an end, he is echoing an objection to utilitarianism made forty years earlier by the British philosopher Bernard Williams. Williams, in a critique of utilitarianism, asks us to imagine that George, an unemployed man with a chemistry degree, is offered a position in a laboratory developing new forms of chemical weapons. (Williams was writing before chemical weapons were banned by international treaty.) George is opposed to the development of chemical weapons, but if he does not take the job it will go to someone who will be much more zealous in pursuing the research than he would have been, and the outcome of George’s rejection of the offer is likely to mean more, not fewer, new forms of chemical weapons.10 If George is to do the most good, he must take the job, keeping his views about chemical weapons to himself while doing as little as possible to advance the goal for which he is being paid to work. To retain his position, however, he will have to do some things that advance the development of new chemical weapons. He may feel bad about that, but a utilitarian can reassure him that what really matters is that fewer deadly weapons will be developed. Williams objects that George is being forced to “step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires.” To do such a thing, Williams argues, would alienate him from his actions and his convictions, with which he identifies, and is, “in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity.”11 Is this true? And if it is, is there a parallel with what those who earn to give are doing when they choose to go into a profession they do not regard as intrinsically desirable? Investment banking is not morally on a par with developing chemical weapons. Nor would people who earn to give be deliberately working against the aims of their employer, as George would have been. On the contrary, they would want to do as well as possible so as to receive the highest possible salary and bonus and be able to donate the most. Nevertheless, to fit into the ethos of the organization in which they want to succeed, people earning to give may have to disguise their views about the intrinsic value of their work. It is also true that some of those who change their career in order to earn to give have stepped aside from their own projects (as Matt stepped aside from his original plan of going to graduate

school and becoming a professor) and have instead taken the career required by “utilitarian calculation.” But does this really mean, as Williams asserts, that they are alienated from their convictions and have lost their integrity? Does it, as Brooks suggests, turn you into a mere means to an end, with corrosive effects on your character? Those who earn to give are, to a greater extent than most people, living in accord with their values—that is, with their core conviction that we ought to live our lives so as to do the most good we can. It is hard to see any alienation or loss of integrity here. On the contrary, for people who share that conviction, integrity would be lost if they were to follow their passion to, let’s say, go to graduate school, write a thesis on Beowulf, and become a professor of medieval literature.12 Perhaps people who earn to give have integrity, yet they may be participating in activities that do harm? One critic puts it like this: “Capitalism in its current global form is worsening inequality. ... A few people are gaining more wealth while many, many more are driven to more extreme poverty as a symptom of the market. The gap is widening between the very rich and very poor. ... [W]orking in the financial industry in order to give to global poverty charities is akin to arsonists giving donations to the local fire department.”13 Capitalism does appear to be increasing inequality, but that does not prove that it is driving people into extreme poverty because inequality can also increase when the rich become richer and the poor stay the same, or even when the poor gain but not by as much as the rich. As we saw in the preface, effective altruists typically value equality not for its own sake but only because of its consequences.14 It isn’t clear that making the rich richer without making the poor poorer has bad consequences, overall. It increases the ability of the rich to help the poor, and some of the world’s richest people, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have done precisely that, becoming, in terms of the amount of money given, the greatest effective altruists in human history. No doubt capitalism does drive some people into extreme poverty—it is such a vast system that it would be surprising if it did not—but it has also lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty. It would not be easy to demonstrate that capitalism has driven more people into extreme poverty

than it has lifted out of it; indeed there are good grounds for thinking that the opposite is the case.15 In any case, those who think the entire modern capitalist economy should be overthrown have conspicuously failed to demonstrate that there are ways of structuring an economy that have better outcomes. Neither have they indicated how, in the twenty-first century, a transition to an alternative economic system might occur. Like it or not, for the foreseeable future we seem to be stuck with some variety of capitalism, and along with it come markets in stocks, bonds, and commodities. These markets serve a variety of roles, including raising investment capital, reducing risk, and smoothing out swings in commodity prices. They don’t seem inherently evil. Granting that earning to give may lead to being involved in financial activities that harm some people does not settle the moral question of what the individual who has the opportunity to earn a lot and give a lot should do. Moral codes of behavior often give the principle “Do no harm” priority over the principle “Do the most good you can.” Those who take this view will consider it wrong to work for a corporation that is harming innocent people, even if the good that one can then do would hugely outweigh this harm. The moral issue that lies behind this attitude arose in a dramatic form during World War II, when the Nazis were aiming their V–1 and V–2 rockets at London. Spies in London were sending them information about the accuracy of the attacks, but the spies were in fact British double agents, and the information was designed to mislead the Germans so that fewer rockets would hit London. It was estimated that this would save 12,000 casualties a month. When the British War Cabinet learned of the deception, in August 1944, Herbert Morrison, a minister and member of the Cabinet, objected that it was morally wrong for the government to determine that people living south of London would be killed rather than people living in central London. The do-no-harm principle seems to underlie this objection, for otherwise the good of preventing many deaths, by causing rockets to fall in rural areas, where they would do less damage, would have outweighed the harm of causing some deaths. Morrison was able to persuade the Cabinet to agree with him (Churchill was abroad at the time), but MI5, the British Security Service, managed to ignore Cabinet’s decision and continue the deception until the end of the war. 16 If you think Morrison was right,

you will probably also think that it is wrong to be involved in financial activities that harm some people, even if that brings about an equivalent benefit to many more. An effective altruist could take this view and still do a great deal of good while complying with the constraint of not doing harm. My own view, however, is that Morrison was wrong, and it was right to save the lives of many civilians. The other relevant issue here is what we are to regard as being wrongfully complicit in a harm. For someone who judges actions by their consequences, to be complicit in wrongful harm requires that one make a difference to the likelihood of the harm occurring. As we saw earlier, if you do not take the position offered by the investment bank, someone else will, and from the bank’s perspective that person will probably be nearly as good as you would have been. If one of the bank’s capital-raising activities is funding a mine that is polluting a river on which many impoverished villagers depend, your refusal to take the job is not going to stop that happening. It will prevent you being able to donate as much to good causes, however, including charities that empower the weak so that they can better resist the depredations of mining companies. Moreover, you may have a better chance of altering the bank’s actions—or, through the bank, the actions of the corporation for which it is raising money—if you are on the inside than if you are protesting from outside. You may find, on the other hand, that you cannot have any influence on the bank’s policies because the corporate culture is to pursue profit regardless of the cost to the poor, and one junior employee cannot counteract that. Perhaps in especially egregious cases the right choice will be to quit and blow the whistle on what the bank is doing. Even then, your choice to work for the bank will have had good consequences, for it will have made you a better-informed, more credible opponent of the bank’s actions. The consequentialist notion of complicity does have implications that many people will reject. It implies, for instance, that the guards at Auschwitz were not acting wrongly if their refusal to serve in that role would have led only to their replacement by someone else, perhaps someone who would have been even more brutal toward those who were about to be murdered there. Given that serving as a concentration camp guard was often an alternative to being sent to the Russian front, this hypothetical was probably sometimes true. One might argue that, rather

than accept this implication, we should consider not the actual consequences of one person’s refusal to be a concentration camp guard but the consequences of everyone following a rule against acting for an institution engaged in wrongdoing. A Kantian might take that view, as would a rule-utilitarian—that is, someone who thinks it wrong to violate a rule if general acceptance of the rule would have good consequences.17 We might also accept a different view of wrongful complicity, one that makes me responsible for the harm done by a group, organization, or other collective in which I intentionally participate.18 Strictly utilitarian effective altruists could not accept these views and so would have to accept the implication that, on a plausible reading of the relevant facts, at least some of the guards at Auschwitz were not acting wrongly. It is possible to combine general support for effective altruism with acceptance of rule-utilitarianism or with another notion of complicity that is not consequentialist at all. If one did so and also held that investment banks and similar corporations are engaged in wrongdoing, one might see this as a sufficient reason for not going into the finance industry. 19 One might also take the view that the normal functions of an investment bank serve a beneficial economic purpose, and there is no need to assume that by going into banking one will be complicit in wrongdoing at all. I suspect that in a decade or two, as we get more experience with earning to give, the ethical objections Brooks and others make to the practice will come to be seen as typical of the grumblings of an older generation that does not really understand what the next generation is doing. A Brookings Institution study has pointed out that millennials are much more concerned about corporate social responsibility than any previous generation, and as employees, they want “their daily work to be part of, and reflect, their societal concerns.”20 There are many ways of achieving that integration between work and social values. For the right person in the right circumstances, earning to give is one of them.

5 Other Ethical Careers Earning to give is a distinctive way of doing good. For those with the abilities required for successfully earning to give, including the ability to find the work sufficiently interesting to do it well and the character to maintain a strong commitment to giving much of what one earns to effective charities, earning to give can be an ethical career choice. Nevertheless, Will MacAskill does not claim that earning to give is always or even usually the best option. Rather, he thinks we should see it as a baseline against which to compare other possible ethical careers.1 The Advocate Will isn’t in finance. That’s because he believes that if he can influence two other people with earning capacities similar to his own to earn to give, he will have done more good than if he had gone into finance himself—and he has already influenced many more than two. 80,000 Hours is a metacharity, a charity that evaluates or promotes other charities. Other metacharities include Giving What We Can, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save. Working for an effective metacharity can do more good than working for an ordinary charity because of the multiplier effect it can have —although this could also be an argument for earning to give and donating to the metacharity. As in the case of an ordinary charity, you could be replaceable, but if you have special skills that others do not have, the payoff from those skills is likely to be high. Will’s understanding of ethics, his argumentative skills, his experience with the effective altruism movement, his knowledge of the facts that underpin effective altruism, and his personal connections in the movement make him extremely difficult to replace. The Bureaucrat